"As the door started closing she understood in a brief moment of lucidity what she would then need months to admit; they had erased each other."

For each day of work, there's a last line and for me to be able
to stop writing, it has to be a particular one. Yesterday's last line
has to turn into today's first line. If this last line echoes in my
ears and holds its promise, it will become the stepping stone for new
sentences that will be assembled until another last line is reached.
And so goes the writing of a novel. Day after day, last lines are being
turned into first.

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I could compare the physical act of
writing to sewing for I progress slowly with small back and forth
movements, stitching a new part to the previous one. Last lines are the
invisible seams of a patchwork that will seem whole when finished.

But some might argue that every book has an actual last line, which unlike all the others will never be turned into a first. That might be true, but I always hope that even the last line of a book will be turned into a first, somewhere, sometimes. Perhaps it will become the first and distinct line of another piece that has yet to be composed. Or it will hopefully be the first and external line of what will spring into the reader's mind once he or she has closed the book.

As children growing up in France, we were told by teachers that every story had to have an "open ending", a last line that would allow the reader to imagine the rest of the story – the point being to make an ending that wasn't really one... I believe that very few people imagine the "rest" after they have finished reading a novel. The first line that comes to their mind may resemble something like "this is so amazing" or "what a stupid end" or "it reminds me of ..." It rarely has to do with that rest of the story - because indeed the story is over – but rather takes the form of a personal comment, the beginning of a conversation that the reader is then going to carry silently with himself. However few last lines have the power to initiate such inner dialogue and only the most troubling and moving last lines have the greatest capacity to inspire. In French, the ending of a story is called la chute, or the fall. This precise choice of words may come from France's somewhat pessimistic take on endings, happy endings being reserved for Hollywood. For me, the musical term point d'orgue which refers to the lasting, the resonance of a note best describes what an ending should be.

The last line of Voice Over, my first novel published in the United States, triggered some intrigued reactions when the book originally appeared in France. A certain number of people asked "Is it positive or negative, good or bad?" This led me to conclude that I had succeeded to a certain degree in creating some form of inner dialogue. But why were French readers so concerned about that good or bad, why did they need a clean-cut resolution? For me, the ending capped so perfectly the trajectory of the main character that there could have been no other. Better yet, the last line had the potential of a first. I couldn't tell them that, of course. So I would simply reply: it all depends on what comes next.

About the author: Céline Curiol is a journalist who has worked for various French media, including Libération, Radio France, and BBC Afrique. Her debut novel, Voice Over, was just published in English by Seven Stories Press, to wide acclaim. Her second novel, Permission, was recently been published in France. Originally from Lyon, France, Curiol lives in New York City, where she is at work on her third novel.